Going Fast (27 page)

“Uh-huh.” Bambi, that's what they called him, Ownie recalled. Once, Archie Diggs, who was a bad bugger, started a rumour that Bambi wore false eyelashes, that he'd seen him buying them in a beauty salon on Gottingen Street. “What were you doin' in a beauty salon?” someone asked, poking holes in Archie's report.

“I was in to talk bidness with the manager,” Archie said, his voice rising with each exorbitant detail. “My wife wasn't satisfied with the quality of the previous work, which burnt her head up like a marshmallow. Them beauty salons are like transmission shops; they'll double-shuffle you silly if don't have no man behind ya. You know that, doncha?”

Bambi and a guy named Dooley had a running act for a bit. They fought each other on seven undercards, the high points being two knockdowns and a TKO. They were best buddies outside of the ring, mortal enemies inside, according to the storyline, so it made for good press.

“My specialty is egg rolls, because I have a fine touch.” Bambi gently folded an imaginary roll, and when he looked up, the cobalt eyes reminded Ownie of a cheap bottle of aftershave. “I'm very precise.”

“Well, you're good with your hands.” Ownie nodded like it made sense.

“We had a screwball working with us for a while. He said he was an ex-army tough guy and a trained assassin, soldier of fortune. He was always leaning on the helpers when it was busy, threatening to take them out if they got in his way, especially the slow learners. He kept it up until I had to ice him. One shot.
Boom!
”

“The world's full of crazy bastards, ain't it?”

“Tell me about it. I hear Dooley's taking a fight up in Moncton.” Bambi sounded anxious at the thought of Dooley, half of his ring identity, entering a bout without him.

“Ahhh,” groaned Ownie, who had last seen Dooley with the midway, running the machine-gun marksman sideshow. “Wave a few bucks in front of those guys and they'll fight from a wheelchair. Dooley had his chance when he fought Turcot in Montreal, and he didn't do nothin'.”

Ownie paused as Tootsy's door opened for a middle-aged woman with a halo of hair.

“Didya hear what happened when we fought down in Sydney?” Bambi's tone lightened. “When Tan Tanner was promotin' the card?”

The woman was struggling, Ownie noticed, with a carpet bag and a tape recorder that seemed to be alive. Nothing involving Tanner would surprise him.

“Well, they didn't get much of a draw. Right?” Bambi continued.

“No fault of yours,” Ownie allowed.

“No way, man. We could bring 'em in, me and Dooley, not like that Archie Dibbs, he couldn't draw peanuts. His mother wouldn't pay to see him. Afterwards, Tanner gives all the fighters their pay envelopes. Right? He says, ‘Don't look until you get it home.' Me and Dooley figure there's a little extra for us and he didn't want the other guys to know. Right?”

“Right on.”

“I got home and mine's half-empty. I called Dooley, and his was too.”

Ownie watched the woman wander across the gym, her flowered dress skimming the floor like a stage curtain. “Tan Tanner is nothin' but a small-time thief. He'd steal your long underwear, you still in them.”

She was probably that woman who'd phoned him, Ownie figured as Bambi left, a freelance writer doing a piece for a magazine. She had given him her name and the name of the magazine, but he had forgotten them both. “How come you can name every fighter Joe Louis fought in twenty-five title defenses but can't get your son-in-law's name straight?” Hildred once scolded him. “I'll tell you why: you don't try.”

The woman was chatting with the old-timer named Barney, who stopped in from time to time in his Legion blazer and medals. Barney, a compulsive liar, always looked polished enough to appear at a veteran's appeal board. Sometimes he left without saying a word, other times he would talk your ear off.

That's her, Ownie decided, when he heard her British accent. Scott said that she was married to a surgeon, so she didn't need the money, just something to do. The woman strolled the gym, her mike raised like a Geiger counter, sticking it near the ring, where Turmoil was sparring with a lanky man
with a Zorro moustache. “Keep the hand up,” Zorro ordered Turmoil. “Double it up, throw combinations side to side, watch what you're doing, and work like a champ.”

The man was wirier than Turmoil but three inches shorter; he looked like a pro baseball player with a trickster smile. “Billy Dee Williams,” said Johnny. Louie, who was tired of the game, blinked
maybe
. They were sitting by the window, taking in the show.

Ownie made the introduction. “This is Fred Green. We brought him in from Chicago.”

Leaning forward, the woman peered at the sparring partner as if she were studying an abstract painting, a non-objective canvas of colour and composition, an enigmatic blur. “I'm Constance Stanhope. I'm doing a magazine piece.”

“Pleased to meet you.” The trickster extended a gracious glove.

“This man is crucial to what we're trying to do,” declared Ownie like a pitchman. “He's worth his weight in gold.”

“Ah,” said Constance, stepping into a shaft of light, where, exposed, her pale skin seemed to redden, then melt like a plastic spoon.

“This man is ring-wise, experienced. He knows how to get the best out of Turmoil. He's tough and comes back at you, and he's exactly what we need.”

“I consider myself a professional sparring partner,” said Fred, taking his cue. He pulled off his helmet, showing a receding hairline. “I've been doing it since I spent seven weeks with Tyson to get him ready for his fight against Michael Spinks. Working with Tyson should have made my career, but there was a newspaper strike on at the time.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Now I'm hoping to hook up with Lewis or Bowe.”He paused and pointed at Constance's recorder. “I don't think it's working.”

Gold bangles clanked as she fiddled with the dials. “What is Turmoil learning from you?” she asked, making a quick recovery.

“I like to change my style as I go along.” Fred shifted his shoulders, slipping undetectable punches. “Sometimes I'll stalk him like Joe Frazier, while at other times I'll use my speed, like Spinks. I like to think that while working with me he'll learn all the different types of opponents he'll face in the ring.”

Constance snorted. “How does he look to you at this stage?”

“I've been boxing fifteen years — I got a quadruple left hook — and he has no difficulty staying with me. It's amazing what he's accomplished this soon.”

“Sparring is essential,” Ownie explained to Constance. “Getting a guy ready for a ten rounder, I start with four rounds, then work it up to six. Finally, two weeks before a fight, I put the sparring up to ten every second day to see how he carries ten.”

“Can Turmoil stay here and be a success?” Constance read from her notebook, her skin back to its raw, freckled state.

“Certainly,” said Ownie.

“What is the hardest thing to teach a fighter?”

“You have to be a psychiatrist; you have to get inside their heads, to make them really believe they have a chance. You never want your fighter to think the other guy is better, because with that thought, no matter how much you train him, ten to one he will lose.”

After Ownie excused himself, Barney approached Constance, humming a distant song that may have been the
“
Siegfried Line.” Constance muttered almost to herself: “He's a very well-built man, isn't he?” She pointed across the room at Turmoil who was practising a jab on his sparring partner.

“Very true, madam,” agreed Barney. Constance, Barney noticed, had a horizontal line across her nose from years of pushing up the end, the result of nervousness or allergies. “Kind of like a young Ali, don't you think?”

“Ah, yes.” Two quick snorts showed that Constance liked the comparison.

“Very perceptive of you to see the parallels.”

“Why thank you,” she said demurely.

Barney took a liver-spotted hand and rubbed his face back and forth as if to clear his thoughts, and then he took the hand, the same one that had fired a Browning .303, and placed it solemnly on Constance's arm. “Not everyone would pick that up.”

“I'm shrewd with faces,” she replied quickly. “It's my arts background; I studied photography with Sherman Hines
and
I paint watercolours.”

After flattering Constance, who was desperate to prove her worth as a boxing reporter and a student of humanity, Barney swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing in the folds of his loose turkey neck. He had a thin, wooden mouth and the hinged jaw of a ventriloquist's dummy. “Did you ever see Ali fight?”

“Ah no,” she allowed, afraid to admit too much.

“You're probably too young.”

Constance blushed, convinced that her look was working: bohemian, but not too bold, a touch of earth mother and earnest truth-seeker along the lines of Joyce Carol Oates.

“I did. And every time I watch this man it sends shivers down my spine.”

Constance stared at Barney's medals, trying to read the inscription with her near-sighted eyes. Then she looked up, seeking clarity. “Oh?”

Barney pointed at Turmoil, as the fighter moved across the
ring, focused on Fred. “The genetic fingerprints are as clear as day. Now, they fight differently, granted, but that's because Ali was probably the fastest heavyweight ever.”

“I'm sorry,” Constance apologized. “I know I seem knowledgeable, but I usually don't cover boxing. As I mentioned, I have an arts background.”

“Well, you are obviously a versatile woman.”

“Thank you.” Turmoil and Fred were talking to Ownie, the trickster's eyes intent but unreadable, like a pitcher taking signals from the plate: thumb in for screwball, four fingers for a curve.

“Perhaps I was being a bit obtuse,” Barney apologized, “discretion being the better part of valour. There has always been speculation that Ali had a missing son.”

“Really?”

“Now, I'm not saying . . . I would never be so bold or presumptuous — but I'm going to let that thought sit with you.” Constance's head flicked with two rapid snorts and Barney, giving her a quick appraisal, muttered, “no spring chicken,” before realizing he had spoken out loud.

“Pardon me?” she begged.

“Nothing, nothing,” he assured her as images of Ali raced through her brain like a National Film Board documentary. Muhammad Ali was an icon, a legend who crossed all boundaries: sports, entertainment, religion, and politics, as handsome as a movie star, as controversial as Castro. The Rumble in the Jungle, the Thrilla in Manila. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Hadn't the Beatles even made a special stop to pose with the Greatest?

“What do you think?” Barney asked.

“Perhaps,” Constance allowed.

“It has bothered me since the first time I met Turmoil, and then, when I found out that they had the same birthday,
January 17, it struck me as prophetic.” Constance gulped. “Of course, Turmoil is bigger, which is not unusual for offspring. At the same age, Ali was only six-foot-two, one-eighty-five, with a thirty-two-inch waist and a forty-six-inch chest, and he compared himself — rightly so, in my opinion — to a Greek god. He was still Clay then, Cassius Marcellus Clay, and he wore three coats of white polish on his boots and Vaseline on his arms to accentuate his muscles.”

“He
was
a handsome man, but I thought Turmoil was from Trinidad.”

“Excellent point.”

Constance smiled as Turmoil and Fred picked up their gear.

“But Ali travelled the globe,” Barney continued. “The most recognizable man on Earth, if you recall. They did a poll and I wish I could remember who came second. Maybe, Joseph Stalin, the pock-faced executioner and brilliant military strategist. I just can't remember, which is the problem with getting old.”

“Has anyone talked to Mr. Ali?”

“No, this is pure conjecture. I don't think it would be right to approach him on something like this, not without adequate promulgation.”

“What about Turmoil's mother?”

“I understand she's a private lady, very devout. She sings in the church choir, in a beautiful, clear soprano voice that can give you goosebumps. I'm sure you can empathize, a refined lady like yourself.”

“Yes, yes, I see.”

With the news conference about to start, the TV producer affected a jaded air of world-weariness. He wore a watch with six time zones and he was dropping place names like breadcrumbs in the forest. “When I was in Rwanda/Haiti/Davis Inlet . . .”

His cameraman, Carl, had a cellphone stuck in his Domke vest and all of his electronic toys spread out for the others to see. Reluctantly, Carl had left his flak jacket in the truck. It was a BCJ with neck collar and groin protector, six pounds of defence against mortar, grenade fragments, and handgun fire up to a .44 Magnum.

“Did we see him in L.A.?” The producer nodded at Smithers, wearing a Habs jersey.

Carl squinted through loonie-shaped glasses, took a geographical fix, and mouthed the word “Looocal.” He made it sound like a disease.

The brewery hall was filling with locals, network jocks, and two chirpy Brits named Lionel and Desmond who'd spent the night in a strip club. Supported by an updraft of gossip and gripes, the media was hovering over sandwiches. A thick man with fire engine red pants sidled up to the producer, the top three buttons of his shirt undone, showing a nest of gold. His mouth hung open like the lower hinge wasn't working.

“What are you guys doing here?” Vance, who wrote a column for a complimentary TV guide, was known as the
Scrumbuster for his uncanny ability to derail a scrum with off-track questions.

“National wants something.” The words floated from Carl's mouth like a yawn. “National” was a codeword that set them apart, that gave them status, money, and access. The producer pulled away from Vance like a leech touched with salt, knowing there was a danger here. If you got too close, you might turn into one of Them; you could get lost in a grove of inconsequence and never escape. The producer pulled a sterling silver Tiffany's yo-yo from his pocket, and turned his back on Vance, who was conveniently light-footed in bowling shoes.